In a short article pertaining to daydreaming in the new Scientific American Mind, April/May ‘07, it discusses the cause and physiology behind daydreaming and how our brains are designed to wander. According to the new study, humans have portions of the brain that are dedicated to wonderment and daydreaming. This region of the brain is turned off and on while our focus changes throughout the day. When our brain is active and focused on tasks, the region shuts down allowing our brains to quiet down while focus is needed. When our brains are not challenged — watching a sunset or passively listening to music — the seven separate regions that are responsible for mental meandering kicks in and allows us to drift away.

What does this have to do with our education system? Well, you can blame it on how school is all about passive memorization. What children so rarely participate in is interactive and engaging learning. Here is what the author has to say about these regions of the brain:

“Now Malia F. Mason of Harvard Medical School and her colleagues have found that dull or unchallenging tasks switch on the default network. They scanned the brains of several subjects while their memory of short sequences of letters was being evaluated. When tested on a familiar set of letters that the subjects had been trained on for days — boring! — their daydreaming networks switched into overdrive. But when they had to focus on sorting out new combinations of letters, the networks fell quiet.”

Now, we all know how boring and dull it is sitting there in class with a teacher reading out of a book, trying to get us to memorize dates, numbers, names, etc. With school children being more susceptible to mental drift, this will not switch off this network. They need new and engaging activities to deactivate this network within the brain. If we could switch off and keep off these regions, we could decrease the child’s likelihood of attention deficit or mind wandering during class time. But, with classrooms being overcrowded and teachers stretched too thin, and memorization is the name of the game, we are looking at less personal attention and less interactive learning. This has been even more problematic in programming these kids to pass standardized tests, so we can appease Bushie and his failed “No Child Left Behind” policy.




We have written many articles about America’s failing education system (Category: Education), and I would like to say this is not a teacher problem, a student problem, or a school building problem, but a complete system problem. I ran an after school program a couple of years ago. In our program, we had 55 children, and of the 55 children, 80% were “problem children” or diagnosed as ADD/ADHD with parents who were at their wits end. By the end of the year, we had only three problem children. The rest were almost completely rehabilitated. How did we do it? Through the use of traditional Japanese martial arts, we instilled discipline, structure and exercise into our daily routine. Through the use of the interactivity of martial arts, we did not allow the kids to drift away. Thus removing all evidence of ADD/ADHD from our children.

Our program went from 40+ kids with some sort of attention deficit disorder to only 3 — more than 90% were misdiagnosed; this conveys that our problem is not the brain’s within the kids, but the failed system in which we expect our kids to do what they are not designed to do. If we can improve the system from the ground up and instill learning and attaining knowledge while engaging the students with interactive activities, we can get our future out of the prescription bottle and into successful colleges and careers for a more promising future. We need to quit looking at the kids for dysfunction and instead look to the system that is failing them.